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SpaceX's Dragon capsule is now safely down from the ISS, showing that private enterprise can do at least some of this space stuff at vastly lower cost than a creaking governmental bureaucracy like NASA.

Bloomberg then makes the entirely incredible argument that this means that NASA should aim to think big and bump up its efforts to get men to Mars and so on. It's very difficult to understand their thinking here:

This should free the space agency to concentrate on carrying out advanced missions. The most important will be manned space flight, the part of NASA’s portfolio that has always been especially popular and inspiring, and which has reliably attracted money from Congress.

If we’re to get beyond near-Earth orbit, NASA needs to articulate the ultimate goal of these expensive expeditions. A government advisory group known as the Augustine Committee offered a smart way to think about this in a 2009 report. It suggested a “flexible path” for future missions, in which humans and robots would work in tandem to explore a logical progression of destinations -- such as the moon and asteroids -- in the inner solar system.

This is after they've noted that the International Space Station itself, NASA's last great project, has cost $100 billion and produced almost nothing of scientific or any other value. And the Space Shuttle really wasn't all that good an idea either.

Surely the correct lesson to learn from this is that now we can see that a lumbering governmental bureaucracy is orders of magnitude more expensive than private industry we should therefore dismantle the lumbering bureaucracy and leave the private industry to get on with things.

It is possible that there are some things that NASA can do which the private companies cannot: pure scientific research perhaps. But the nuts and bolts of getting things into space just doesn't seem to be an operation which the agency is suited to any more. So it shouldn't be doing it.